Any Other Questions?

It is a privilege to answer: “Ours is absolutely, gladly, hopefully and humbly, gaily, a gay church, a gay tradition, where everyone, including heterosexual members and friends, is welcome, where everyone is needed, where everyone’s experience is cherished as a sacred text, because no one’s experience of living or loving can be comprehensive, because each of us holds clues the others need about how to live with dignity and joy as a human person, and none of us knows enough about that yet to be considered whole.

"It is absolutely a gay church, even as ours is a gay world, if you would look around. Gay church, straight church, peoples’ church, a human congregation made holy by the holy hopes and fears and dreams of all who wish to come. Come in, we say. Come out, come in. We’re all in this together.”

I will not speak of “tolerance,” with its courteous clenched teeth and bitter resignation. I will not speak about “acceptance,” of “other” people and some “other” kind of “lifestyle.” I can only look in laughing wonder at human life in all its incarnations. I can taste only in passing the breath of the spirit of life on my mouth and understand our common longing to breathe in deep, deep gulps of it. I cannot think of being anybody else’s “ally,” even, because even that implies some degree of separation—some degree of safety for some of us, not all. We are “allied” with no one and with nothing but love—the larger Love transcending all our understanding, within which all the different, differing, gorgeously various, variant, beautifully deviant aspects of ourselves are bound in elegant unity.

I know that on some sad and disappointing days these words describe the church that yet shall be and not the church that is. I know, I know....But I know too that to answer is an act of creation. To answer this question, and some others, is a privilege, a prophetic imperative, a joy, a duty, and a holy sacrament.

About the Author

The Rev. Victoria Safford is minister of the White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. She is the author of Walking Toward Morning: Meditations (Skinner House, 2003) and a contributor to The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's...